It does not seem that any kind of weather but bright sunshine ever prevailed in West Injy Lane. Certainly, Ed Mason and I did not see how it could be improved. At one end, near the pond, was the country grocery where you could get weighed on the scales, and buy jumbles (shaped like an elephant) at two for a cent. Near the other end was Haskell's Field,--a hallowed spot, for it always contained one or two grass-covered rings, the relics of circuses past and the promise of circuses to come.
Midway between the two, and in front of one of the houses, was a gigantic and half-ruined elm, already celebrated in legend and verse. Its romantic story never impressed us, except to make me wonder how it happened that when the young man had stuck a willow branch into the ground in front of his sweetheart's dwelling, an elm tree should have sprouted therefrom.
"'Twasn't a willow," said Ed Mason, as we walked through the lane one morning, "'twas a piece of elm."
"Yes, he does, too! Fred Noyes told him, and Peter Bailey told _him_, and Cap'n Bannister told _him_."
The name of Captain Bannister was potent. He lived in a house on this very lane,--a small, red-faced man with black hair. He had been a sailor, it was said, but he was a farmer now, so far as he had any occupation at all. He had no family and no servants, and he dwelt alone with a fluctuating number of cats.
His house was painted white,--spotless and shining. It was without blinds, and so dazzling as to make you sneeze when you looked at it. The path up to his front door was lined, not with the usual white-washed rocks, but with large white sea-shells from some foreign country. Back of these were double rows of cinnamon pinks, the Captain's joy and pride.
Once I had been taken by my elders to call on Captain Bannister. He showed us around his house,--a museum of curiosities. But of all the stuffed birds, all the spiny and prickly fishes, all the curious bits of coral and wooden ships somehow stuffed into glass bottles,--none had seemed so interesting as a small box filled with what the Captain assured me was "tooth-powder from China." That the Chinese should know and use a pink substance so much like that with which I had to struggle every morning seemed to me nothing less than marvellous.